We had two great dives, the final day of Lisa's certification course. Lisa passed her written test with flying colors, so she is certified! Better still, she loves diving! Enough to go in the water where lots of nasty creatures (jellyfish, fire coral, and sharks). We are once again thinking about the Maldives...
We are at the dive shop, talking about whether it's OK for Lisa to dive the Blue Hole so soon after completing her course. They say "we can't recommend it, but people do it all the time". So I guess that's enough for Lisa to screw up her courage and say "let's do it!". We sign up and do a little dance to celebrate. The dive shop was really nice and decided to send one of their divers, Richard, who is a Rescue Diver along to hold Lisa's hand (literally).
The next morning starts very early, 6 am. We get on the boat and start the 2 hour ride to the dive site. The divemaster (it's from a shop on nearby San Pedro) does a very thorough briefing, making sure everyone knows not to descend faster than he does, and not to rise above the trailing diver (bracketing the divers like this assures noone gets the bends).
We begin the dive by dropping to 50 ft, then start descending along the 45 degree bottom until we reach the edge of The Hole. It is like the ocean floor just completely disappears. In fact, some millions of years ago, this entire area was above ground, and the hole did not exist. It was the roof of a huge underground cavern that collapsed, perhaps during an earthquake. It dropped to a depth of about 400 ft, coming to rest on the cave floor. Time passed, and the entire area was submerged beneath the ocean. Jacques Cousteau made the place famous by filming an episode here in the '70s.
We reach the lip, then descend straight down. When we get down to the full depth, about 134 feet, we are disoriented, as there is nothing below us for reference. There are only the dim cave walls to orient us. Our bodies feel very dense, and it's slightly difficult to breathe. We are in a completely bizarre world. A strange mixture of Dr. Seuss and Journey to the Center of the Earth. There are gigantic stalactites hanging down over 50 ft from the cave's ceiling. As we swim amongst these magnificent formations, they are backlit by the deep blue light of the ocean beyond. It was truly magical.
We only had about 8 minutes at depth, but you could see a number of reef sharks, some big ones (maybe 8 ft?) swimming around in the distance. Everything seemed like it was in slow motion. Huge groupers came up to check us out, sometimes coming within reach.
After this mind-bending period, we had to begin our slow ascent, with about 15 minutes remaining at around 50 ft. The reef sharks were even more numerous at this point, and it was difficult for Lisa to do her 15-minute decompression because we must have had over a dozon of those sharks lurking in the distance. And some even came close, giving us a chill!
Believe it or not, this has been Lisa's favorite thing to date!!!! I loved it too.
We did two more dives this day. To Lighthouse Reef, and a place called The Aquarium.
Both of these dives were absolutely spectacular, with too many fish species to mention. The first one, The Aquarium, had a maze of coral formations, with gorges running in and out that you could swim through. At one point, I began to enter one of these, when Richard tapped me on the tank and pointed. A 7-9 ft Green Moray Eel came completely out of his usual cave and swam across the gorge. These guys are pretty territorial, so I opted out! Really cool to see though.
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